Quick Paella

If you've been taking a glance at our nightly dinners, you may notice that most our meals are pretty simplistic - "one pot wonders" I like to call them.  We usually save slightly more complicated ones for when we have friends over.  Also, I loathe doing dishes - they are my least favorite cleaning task. It saves a lot of stress to plan out meals that I know will be simple to make when we're in a pinch to get to the table.

Tonight's dinner turned out to be a good one.  David ate it up and I had to steal some for lunch leftovers before he got to the remainder of the pan.

Paella ingredients:

1/2 lb chicken breast cutlets, cut into small little pieces
12 oz of medium shrimp (I buy the 26/30 kind, frozen or fresh - whatever is cheapest)
2 pouches of Uncle Ben's Ready Rice (Garden Veggie flavor)
1/2 cup frozen green peas

The recipe called for saffron to be mixed with the protein before cooking - however as I was standing in the spice aisle staring at 1 oz of saffron for the low low price of $20 - I found myself shying away from the ingredient. There is no substitute to saffron - there is a reason for the price.  I, however, used just a touch of tumeric & 1/3 cup of water for the coloring, and spiced up the mixture with about 2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper.

Cook the chicken, shrimp, tumeric, cayenne & water mixture in a pan until meat is cooked through.  Stir in package cooked rice & frozen peas, and cook only for about another minute until the peas defrost.

Traditional paella is a bit more complex and has a few more ingredients, but this recipe did the job.